James Conrad dropped a short putt to win the 2021 Professional Disc Golf World Championship in a playoff over Paul McBeth. The dagger before he, though, came on the last hole of regulation play. Conrad trailed by a stroke (stroke? fling? fuck if I know) before he did this:
— Disc Golf Pro Tour (@DiscGolfProTour) June 27, 2021
Back in the day, when we made a habit of playing frisbee golf around the W&M campus, we didn't know we could do it professionally. That might've changed some things. Out, out, brief candle.
If you're online and remotely into sports, you've already seen this. It was a SportsCenter Top 10 selection on Sunday evening. We're not breaking news here.
But this play was so spectacular, and so unexpected, that it's worth a half-assed Gheorghian treatment.
I can't believe it, either
Once the class of MLS, D.C. United is today a mediocre side. Pants, if you will. Headed into Sunday's match against Orlando City, United were in last place in the Eastern Conference by five points. To be fair, they've played significantly fewer matches than the average team, and an overwhelming majority of their matches thus far have been played away from home as construction was wrapped up on Audi Field, the club's new home.
Over the past several seasons, the club's developed a reputation for poor management, tight purse-strings, and lousy on-field results. That's starting to change, as the new stadium comes online and new ownership with professional sports experience takes over. DCU picked up U.S. national Paul Arriola last season as a step forward.
And last month, the club added international legend Wayne Rooney, which felt at the time as much of a marketing tactic as anything else.
It doesn't feel like that any longer.
Deep into second-half stoppage time against Orlando, with the match tied at 2 (Orlando equalized through Dom Dwyer despite playing with only 10 men for most of the second half), DCU won a corner kick. Head coach Ben Olsen waived goalkeeper Dave Ousted into the penalty box, pushing all 11 players forward in a desperate attempt to earn a critical three points.
The risk a team runs in pushing that many players forward is obvious. A quick clearance can lead to a counterattack against an empty net.
Cue quick clearance. Cue counterattack. Cue Orlando City three-on-one break, with Rooney - who's 32, with a million miles on his odometer, having started playing in the Premier League as a 16 year-old - as the only thing standing in the way of a devastating loss for his side. Freeze the video below at the 0:13 mark - all Orlando's Will Johnson needed to do was whip the ball into the center of the field, and either of two teammates would've walked it in. (And if you want to see desperation, check out Ousted's pellmell sprint to get back to his goal at around the 0:49 mark.)
You know what happened next. Rooney sprinted 40 yards, made a saving tackle along the sideline, sprung to his feet, took three rapid touches forward, and launched an inch-perfect cross-field diagonal ball onto the head of 5'3" Luciano Acosta, who leapt over a defender and nodded the ball into the side of the net for his third goal of the game.
Madness ensued. At Audi Field and in my living room. I watch more MLS than most people (which isn't saying all that much), and I'm quite sure I've never been as dumbfounded, never leapt to my feet involuntarily by a play in our domestic league. It might well have been the most remarkable soccer play I've ever seen.
As the bloggers at Black & Red United said (with cool accompanying screenshot), "That’s 32 year old, multi-million-dollar Premier League import Wayne Rooney. The number nine. The guy people said was past it. He’s the one having to make a 50 yard sprint this far into stoppage time on a muggy night to prevent a bad draw from turning into a worse loss."
I never fancied myself much of a Wayne Rooney fan, but after watching that effort, and hearing more and more about the level of professionalism and commitment he's brought to D.C. in his short tenure, I'm sold.
My wife thinks it's a mid-life crisis. I don't really see it that way, but if it means she'll give me permission to do stuff I want to do, then I'll let her believe it.
As most of the Gheorghies know, I jumped out of an airplane yesterday with FOGTB Kevin Reynolds, veteran of more than 4,000 jumps of his own. It's a bit of a copout to say that words can't describe the experience, but it's also mostly true. It was a cocktail of adrenaline, nausea, fear, euphoria and release. And it was completely, utterly, entirely a blast.
I've uploaded raw footage from Reynolds' GoPro to my Google Drive for your viewing pleasure/mocking fun. I'll do the same with the professionally produced HD video, as well, but I don't have that with me. (Note that I can't share anything in Google Drive publicly, so I've only shared with the email addresses I have for FOGTB. If you can't view it, shoot me a note.)
Before you watch, a couple of observations:
It's really damn hard to look cool wearing the egg-shaped leather beanie/helmet required of all tandem jumpers.
I didn't feel terribly nervous at any point, but you sure wouldn't know that by the look on my face in the first few moments of this video. My face looks frozen.
Zman and Mark may catch a few glimpses of my Rod Lavers, one of which came untied mid-jump.
Careful observers will also enjoy the t-shirt I chose for the adventure.
The video is about 8 minutes long. Feel free to skip through the middle section, unless you'd like to hear the conversation I have with Reynolds.
The whole thing, from boarding the plane to landing, lasted maybe 20 minutes. Much of it, as you might imagine, is a blur. I remember saying 'holy shit!' a lot.
There are lots of great year-end lists - we'll have our own at some point later this week. National Geographic's list of the year's best photos is well worth your time, as is Reuters' (warning: some of the latter's photos of the year are graphic depictions of violence). Largehearted Boy offers an exhaustive compendium of lists of the best books of the year - a list of lists, if you will. I assume Dave has read all of them. Every radio station worth it's salt has offered its take on the year in music. My favorites include the SiriusXMU Top 41 and the KEXP.com Top 90.3 albums, but your results will vary.
With all that effort expended by others, who are we to try to pile on? No, we'll keep it short and amazing. The G:TB Photo of the Year was taken in 2013's first month by Portugese surf photographer To Mane at Nazare, Portugal. The shot captures Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara's ride of what is allegedly the largest wave ever surfed. I was captivated by it the first time I saw it, and I have the same reaction every time I come across it again. It's stunning, and not done justice in any way at this size:
Here's video of McNamara talking about the ride:
I imagine both McNamara and Mane will be both pleasantly surprised and more than a little confused when the commemorative chocolate statues of Gheorghe arrive at their homes.
The 1996 film, Broken Arrow, was an entertainingly stupid caper flick about a stolen nuclear weapon. John Travolta, Christian Slater, and (memorably) Howie Long chewed scenery for 108 minutes before Slater, the ever-cute Samantha Mathis (so great in The Thing Called Love), and good triumph over evil and the free world (or at least Salt Lake City) is saved.
Recently declassified documents tell a story of a far more terrifying 1961 incident involving American nuclear weapons. We're talking Travolta-in-Battlefield-Earth terrifying. Say goodbye to the Eastern Seaboard terrifying. Ted Cruz as President terrifying.
According to a 1969 report authored by a Pentagon safety expert obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by author Eric Schlosser, a B-52 was forced to jettison a pair of Mark 39 nuclear bombs over North Carolina. The Mark 39's were 250 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima in 1945.
While this seems scary on the face of it, nuclear devices are equipped with a number of redundant failsafe systems designed to mitigate against accidental detonation, even when dropped from aircraft. These systems obviously worked, or the annual OBFT would be held in coastal Asheville.
Well, one of them did, anyway. Mark 39 bombs featured four separate failsafe mechanisms. In the case of one of the two munitions dropped from the faltering B-52, three of the four failed. The only backstop that performed as designed was a single toggle switch - a simple electrical circuit. The author of the 1969 report deems the failure of that switch "a postulate that seems credible".
Such a failure would've loosed 4 megatons of destructive force, sending lethal fallout as far north as Philadelphia. Setting aside the fact that losing the City of Brotherly Love might be a net positive, millions of other lives would've been jeopardized.
Here’s the scary part: We still have thousands of nuclear warheads, many
of which are ready to be launched at a minute’s notice. In an interview with Mother Jones,
Schlosser says it’s remarkable—no, “incredible”—that a major city
hasn’t been destroyed since Nagasaki. But he doesn’t think our luck will
last. His prediction: “If we don’t greatly reduce the number of nuclear
weapons in the world, or completely eliminate them, a major city is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon.”
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